Sunday, June 17, 2012

It's with some real delight that we bring you advance word and sounds from the second release on our Puer Gravy imprint and the first album of new material by maverick electronic explorer and former Storm Bugs/Snatch Tapes operative Philip Sanderson since his 2005's Seal Pool Sounds CD. The subtly unnerving and the psychologically suggestive are kissing cousins in these constructs, their preternaturally heightened atmospheres generated from an arsenal of analog synths, delay units and sequencers, and teased into formulations as sly as they are elegant, with Hollow Gravity evincing echoes of both sci-fi soundtrackers like ‪Gil Mellé‬ and Louis & Bebe Barron and the mischievous audio contraptions of LAFMS's Solid Eye. Due for official release on July 2nd, 2012, this is a strictly limited edition of 100 copies and is pressed on 180-gram, laser etched vinyl. You can download all of Side A Here and you can pre-order your copy now at our Puer Gravy site.

A fantastic adjunct to the material on this LP can be heard via exclusive work that Sanderson's recorded earlier this month for Daniel Blumin's WFMU show here

Note: there was an earlier version of this post that went up last night and which contained an error with the download of Side A, so those 80 or so of you who grabbed this during the hour it was up before realizing our error also unexpectedly received a half-finished Vas Deferens Organization piece called Petite Petanque Petard that was intended as source material for the French band Audace to manipulate for our forthcoming split LP with them and Ben Presto and which somehow mysteriously migrated into this folder.This has now been fixed.

Documenting the moment in which these under-sung sages of post-Residential art rock mutation peel back the exaggerated displays of febrile freakishness heard on their two earlier 9" flexi discs (their reason for inclusion on the hallowed Nurse With Wound list), Clear Memory reveals a wonderland of sense-expanding psychedelic potentiality lurking below the surface. The first salvo here is a revealing one, exhibiting a dewily dappled and eerily serene side to their work that feels informed by Harmonia's Deluxe or Cluster's Sowisoso before launching into an utterly distinct species of home-brewed, blearily dazed and rhythm-boxed basement acid rock, variations of which they've been articulating from this moment forward to the present day one, as these long-in-the-tooth outsiders are still flying their freak flags all these years later. This and the following cassette "Confidential" were issued in minuscule numbers to those in their immediate circle and promptly disappeared down the memory hole. Now marks the perfect time for a corrective to that and the ability to bring these strange, glazed and deliriously swarming compositions to many new ears. This has however been graced with a new cover, as the semi-private original tape edition featured unauthorized use of a friends artwork. Those too curious to stop themselves from looking might find the original lurking somewhere within the confines of their own site here, though. You can find a wealth of other Bomis audio goodies over at their Free Music Archive page Here as well as via the split CDR with Eric Lunde that I shared with my last round of posts. Further info can be found on my post about them on Ad Hoc.

Given the combination of irreverent titles and a cover with arabic script of unknown origin, I'll err on the side of skin-saving caution and leave the actual cover for those who download this classic slice of 80's cassette culture shenanigans, the first release of unabashed Zappa damage from the sly mind of one Joe Newman (pictured above in lieu of the cover), whose LP "Bowling For Appliances" I shared long ago, though much like Zoogz Rift's personalization of the Zappa muse, there's much more than mere emulation afoot here. At this early stage of the game, Newman's arrangements had yet to hit the dizzying spin-on-a-dime stride they'd achieve by the time of Bowling For Appliances, but the playfully Casio-toned primitivism of this first iteration is full of a giddy louche charm of it's own, if laden with some decidedly dodgy sub-Zappa titles ala Asparagus Makes Your Urine Smell Funny. Much as you'd expect from that title, it's the more overtly poo-poo/caca-fied dimensions of Zappa's influence that holds the most sway in Newman's universe, though their rough and ready home taper expression here lends the proceedings an intimate absurdism that's very much Newman's own.

This daft "real people" private press mega-rarity is a document from South Side Senior High School circa 1970 and while plenty here spans the gap from drippy to corn-pone, there's a reason that this DIY piece has attained serious collector cache, as amidst the prosaic and the outright awful (unless do-see-do-ing your partner is your bag), you'll find outbursts of out-of-the-blue bedazzlement from the portion of this album reserved for Emmanuel Angel's two solo pieces, which sound rudely confounding and acid scrambled enough to be emanating from an ESP Records platter or from the Austrian cave that NWW-listers The Nomadia recorded their LSD psychodrama within.

Perennial improv gadfly Eugene Chadbourne and his sarcasm-steeped escapades have been cutting against the grain of the free music community for over three decades, but circa the early 80's he could be found mixing it up with Shimmy Disc label head Kramer and his house drummer David Licht (B.A.L.L./Bongwater/ When People Were Shorter And Lived Near The Water) in this quasi-improvisational quasi-psychedelic and aggressively tongue-in-cheek good-timey rave-up unit, only unlike the Naked City model of Cuisinart-cut post-modern pastiche favored by John Zorn, Chadbourne's bandmate in the pre-Shockabilly outfit The Chadbournes, Shockabilly meld the idiomatically chalk and cheese by simply melting both in a bubbling fondue pot of snarky mischief, as they tackle covers of everything from 8 Miles High to Roger Miller's country chestnut "Dang Me", all enveloped within Kramer's cheaply reverberant loving-hands-at-home production values.

As for the time being i'm searching for resource material i would appreciate any scans or photocopies of late 70's/early 80s fanzines on experimental/industrial/punk/DIY stuff.Especially i would appreciate photocopied issues of:AURA,FACE OUT,FOOLS MATE(******) NEWSTYLE(esp.Nr 10)ATEM magazine,AUDION magazine,Grohinga Well(or something like that,Belgian magazine).If you can provide any of this stuff please contact me.